What They Said: The State Elections

Election results for the states including Tamil Nadu and West Bengal were announced Friday. It was no ordinary Friday: It was Friday the 13th. But for the women who were voted into power yesterday, it was a lucky day. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress Party broke the long run of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who had been at the helm of the state for over three decades. Communist-led coalitions lost not just in West Bengal, but in Kerala as well. In Tamil Nadu, actress-turned-politician J. Jayalalitha’s AIADMK swept the DMK out of power, a party which has been the focus of corruption allegations.

India Real Time presents a selection of editorials, commentaries and opinions on the state elections from Indian newspapers.

Political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan, began his Saturday editorial in The Times of India with an apt phrase from the bible – “How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle/ O Jonathan thou wast slain in thine high places” – to comment on the loss of the CPI(M) and the DMK. Mr. Rangarajan wrote that the voters did more than just “unseat incumbent governments,” adding that the results will force the parties to “rethink the fundamentals of its ideology” and lead many others to “ponder the perils of putting kin and clan in charge of party.”

He wrote that “for a party that was a critic of economic reform, it is ironic that it was Nandigram and Singur that proved its undoing,” referring to episodes involving the government’s heavy-handed repression of farmers protesting against the party’s industrialization and land acquisition policies. They became the symbols for Trinamool Congress and Ms. Banerjee, who took a firm stance in the farmers’ defence.

Mr. Rangarajan further added that the defeat would call for a deep introspection, adding that this is easier said than done, since “[The CPI(M)'s] outlook and programme are yet to grapple with the post-Cold War world.” Delhi-based writer Mukul Kesavan, in a column in theHindustan Times, noted how the Left’s defeat was brought by the same “peasantry that it had empowered,” while “a bourgeois party that inaugurated the economic ‘liberalisation’ of India in 1991, managed to position its dynast as a champion of peasants menaced by the capitalist predators,” a reference to Rahul Gandhi who recently joined farmers’ protests against the land acquisition policy in Uttar Pradesh.

Looking at the Left’s legacy in West Bengal, Mr. Kesavan said he saw it as having “pan-India significance that’s quite separate from its record as a party of government in the provinces.” He saw the Left’s real value in terms of how it “stood in the way of Indian politics being polarised around Congress and BJP.” The Left’s tragedy, as Mr. Kesavan sees it, is that “it was a pragmatic and successful social-democratic party that refused, ideologically, to accept that characterisation.”

Another editorial headlined “Those smaller big players” on Saturday in the Hindustan Times said that these assembly elections show that rather than national parties, the “regional parties decide the architecture of alliances, which in turn lead the poll outcomes.”

An Indian Express editorial headlined “Historic Friday,” wrote that while Ms. Banerjee’s victory was remarkable, the true test of West Bengal begins now. As the editorial puts it, “From agitationist, Banerjee must move to administrator.”

“She must not only talk, but work, and seen to be doing so. Because the desperation and discontent behind the hunger for change that has swept her to power demand her to act from Day 1,” the editorial adds. But the editorial also said that the primary task for Ms. Banerjee is to “restitch Bengal’s body politic” that has been “shredded thin by the years of political violence” and “restore civility to the state’s politics.”

In another commentary in the tabloid Mail Today, political activist Ranbir Samaddar wrote that Ms. Banerjee can learn from the style of administration of the late Jyoti Basu, a leader of the CPI(M) and former chief minister of West Bengal. Mr. Samaddar recalls Mr. Basu’s post- 1977 administration – a time when dissent was at its highest and the Marichjhanpi massacre took place. Instead of focusing on “witch-hunting,” as the columnist calls it, Mr. Basu’s government began political and rural reforms.

“The patronage and clientele system was put in place in the remarkable Jyoti Basu way, namely all were welcome in this world of distribution of goods and goodies, certainly opposition politicians, businessmen, youth leaders, etc., provided that they accepted the rule and became part of the system. Normality returned.”

While Mr. Samaddar agreed that times have changed, he argues that there are lessons to be learnt from that period: “Those who govern have to learn how to rule without revenge, administer without or with minimum bloodshed, how to include as many as possible in the system rule, and how to exclude the least and marginalise dissent.”

For the first time West Bengal will have a woman chief minister, and this will be difficult for some to accept, Mr. Samaddar concludes: “Never before the future politics in Bengal depended on the sense of practical politics and determination of one person — a woman. Let as of now the upper caste Bengali intellectuals refusing to take her seriously cool their heels.”

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